Critical Capital

When the behind-the-meter power generation company Intersect launched a decade ago, the playbook for setting up renewable generation was pretty straightforward: secure power purchase agreements with your customers, then build your generation.

But Intersect took a different -- and far riskier – path. They built generation infrastructure before anyone signed up to buy it.  Without buyers, the company would have sunk. But a spike in U.S. energy demands fueled by massive data centers put Intersect in the perfect spot. It had a product nobody else had: immediately deployable power.

Intersect built 14 generation projects, and this spr...

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For decades, clean energy technology was framed as a moral imperative; a necessary strategy for saving the planet. Today, it’s just good business. 

Thanks to rapid breakthroughs in generation and storage, the unit economics of cleantech have reached price parity with — and in some cases even undercut — fossil alternatives. But despite the incentives, this shift away from fossil fuels continues to hit roadblocks. Broken project finance stacks, risk-averse underwriters, and political...

If there’s one thing stakeholders in the energy sector can agree on, it’s that new infrastructure needs to get built faster and more reliably. A recent Crux study, for instance, found that federal permitting delays hamper clean energy projects for an average of six months; cancellations due to endless litigation are common. 

For years, federal lawmakers have sought to expedite this process through permitting reform: a legislative package that would streamline new energy generation and transmission projects. Yet despite consensus that reform is needed, getting lawmakers to agree on the particulars has proved elusive.

Thi...

The rush to build data centers has sparked an energy debate: will gas meet the growing demand or will clean firm power like nuclear step in? Nuclear has bipartisan support, new contracts from tech companies, and the capital to build. What it needs, according to Lara Pierpoint, is to be built on time and on budget with government support that lasts.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Lara Pierpoint, managing director of Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition and a nuclear engineer by training, to talk about what it will take to build clean power for...

Home energy has spent most of a decade being sold as a premium product, priced at a margin homeowners would pay for something they wanted. Zach Dell says there’s a better way. He argues that electricity is a commodity, that the cheapest version is the best one, and that getting there means owning the supply chain that produces it.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with Zach, co-founder and CEO of Base Power, about what it costs to make power cheap. Zach argues the number that matters is the fully landed cost, the parts, manufacturing, logistics, fi...

American industry is building factories, mines, and grid hardware at a scale not attempted in decades, and the capital is there. But Erin Price-Wright says the cost of money no longer sets the return on an industrial project. It’s the time spent waiting on a regulator.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with Erin who joined Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice in 2024 to invest in energy, mining, and industry. She argues the grid's real constraint is transmission and equipment, not generation, which has made smaller, faster hardware competitive with scale.

Together, they dig into wh...

AI is still in the foothills of enterprise adoption, but the infrastructure buildout required to support it is already reshaping energy markets, capital allocation, and industrial policy. Data centers are driving demand for new generation and transmission, while billions of dollars flow into the hardware and software needed to train and run increasingly powerful models. 

That makes energy infrastructure a big constraint in the AI buildout race. Data centers require more power generation, transmission, grid capacity, and additional physical infrastructure; all major investments. And those energy systems will have impacts on the cost of running potentially more p...

Energy policy has become increasingly polarized just as the U.S. faces record electricity demand, a rapidly expanding AI economy, and growing competition from China. 

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis about why the country's biggest energy challenge is the inability to build durable, bipartisan policy that survives changes in political leadership. 

Drawing on more than a decade in the Senate, Tillis argues for an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that embraces renewables, natural gas, nuclear, and other generation sources rather than treating them as competing ideologies. He discusses the economic co...

We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by Jessica Bailey, Global Head of Infrastructure at Nuveen, an institutional giant with over $1.4 trillion in assets under management. Jessica directs $40 billion in infrastructure investments and discusses how the collision of the energy transition, digitalization, and aging grid systems is creating an unprecedented investment landscape.

Jessica shares her unique journey fr...

Conflict and disaster displace millions of people around the world every year, and millions more live with food insecurity, unreliable access to electricity or no electricity at all.  These same populations are also the most adversely impacted by climate change, geopolitical competition for resources, and global instability.  David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and former UK Foreign Secretary, says the world is at a "hinge moment."

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Miliband to discuss the breakdown of the post-WWII international order and what it means for the world’s most vulnerable popu...

The rapid rise of AI has sparked a multi-trillion-dollar collision between our aging power grid and massive, energy-hungry AI "factories."

 
Unlike traditional cloud data centers, AI training workloads are incredibly dense and volatile, capable of spiking or dropping power demand in milliseconds and threatening grid stability.  Dr. Varun Sivaram, CEO of Emerald AI, says the solution lies in load flexibility. 

By using software to dynamically shift AI workloads across time (temporal flexibility) or across the country (spatial flexibility), data centers can adapt to the grid rather than overloading it. It’s an approach that...

On today’s stage, China is the rising global power, and U.S. dominance is under threat. Geopolitical tensions like wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, combined with supply chain disruptions and a growing demand for rare earth minerals, continue to strain the relationship. But that relationship is key to the future of energy in the United States.

  
In this episode, Alfred Johnson talks with Harvard professor and geopolitical strategist Graham Allison. Together, they unpack the growing rivalry between the United States and China through the lens of the “Thucydides Trap,” a concept Graham popularized in his b...

The electric grid is under pressure from every direction: surging demand from AI data centers, electrification, utility-scale renewables, and new industrial loads. But according to Drew Baglino, one of the biggest constraints isn’t generation, it’s the aging hardware that moves electricity across the system.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron Power and former Tesla executive, to discuss why power electronics have become critical bottlenecks in the clean energy transition. After nearly two decades at Tesla leading powertrain, charging, and energy systems, Drew is now focused on reth...

For decades, the United States bet on globalization: open markets, cheaper goods, and far-flung supply chains. But that model is breaking down. After pandemic disruptions and rising tensions with China, a new bipartisan consensus is emerging that America needs to rebuild its industrial base.

The real question now isn’t whether to reshore critical industries, it’s whether the U.S. can do it consistently.

In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Bianchi, former Deputy U.S. Trade Representative and current senior managing director at Evercore, to unpack the forces reshaping global trad...

For 40 years, the U.S. economy has been optimizing itself for the digital world while exporting its physical manufacturing capabilities. Now, the rise of AI is leaving a massive physical footprint in the form of data centers, power plants, and supply chains.

In this first episode of Critical Capital, Crux CEO and host Alfred Johnson sits down with Aidan Madigan-Curtis, partner at Eclipse Ventures, to discuss why the next generation of trillion-dollar companies will be built where "atoms and bits" connect. They trace the industrial arc from the Gilded Age to the modern age of physical...

The future of energy isn’t shaped by technology alone. It’s shaped by markets, policy, capital flows, and the institutions that connect them.

Trillions of dollars are moving into clean and critical infrastructure, across energy, advanced manufacturing, supply chains, AI, and digital infrastructure. But the forces driving those investments are complex, global, and often misunderstood.

Alfred Johnson is the CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. He has spent his career working at the intersection of finance, software, and public policy. On Critical Capital, Alfred talks with the people deploying capital, shap...